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Political madness on three fronts

I will mash these all together rather than put up three posts since they really are all about the same kind of thing: political madness.

First there is the disaster with the re-election of Dan Andrews, but I am not sure that electing Matthew Guy would have been much less of a disaster. That there was even an election going on in Victoria was something I only barely noticed. Labor will only raise my taxes and shovel heaps of money into useless construction projects – my favourite being the one billion being spent on the new train station at The Shrine. Not only will no one take the train there around 364 days of the year, but there are around half a dozen tram lines that go there already from the city. But if your aim is to create wealth-depleting forms of employment, it’s about as good as anything.

The worry is that our Federal Libs will draw the wrong lessons. At the national level, the name of the game is border protection. I realise that it is no longer fashionable to make distinctions between Australians who want to live in Australia and non-Australians who want to live in Australia, but there is a distinction, and the Libs have got to make it an election issue.

Let me meld this into climate change. I understand that there must be no end of people contributing to the party who wish to see subsidised “renewables” but you have to resist. But while some ideas are crazier than others, this one has a kind of madness that really ought to terrify anyone, specially since the probability of a new ice age seems higher than a rapidly heating planet. But how’s this: Controversial sun barrier technically possible, would be “remarkably inexpensive”.

Spraying sun-dimming chemicals high above the Earth to slow global warming could be “remarkably inexpensive”, costing about $A3.1 billion a year to run over a 15-year period, according to a study by US scientists.

Some researchers say the geo-engineering technique known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) could limit rising temperatures that are causing climate change.

As yet unproven and hypothetical, it would involve the use of huge hoses, cannons or specially designed aircraft to spray large quantities of sulphate particles into the upper layer of the atmosphere to act as a reflective barrier against sunlight.

Total costs to launch a hypothetical SAI effort 15 years from now would be $A4.8 billion, scientists at Harvard University said in a report published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, adding that average annual operating costs would be about $A3.1 billion a year over 15 years.

And the last takes us to the next political sensation in the United States: Fox News has found a new ‘villain’ in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is hardly a villain, more a figure of fun, someone to laugh at. But I wouldn’t laugh that much myself, since she really does represent the future of a large proportion of the Democratic Party in the US, and of parties on the left everywhere.

In addition to being a Latina woman, she’s calling for bold, progressive initiatives for America that Fox News has deemed socialism. (In reality, Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic Socialist and is championing issues like Medicare for all and raising the minimum wage to $15 — not the government taking control of all means of production, as we would see in traditional socialist governments.)